Telecommunication networks are a collection of nodes that are interconnected for the purpose of carrying communication data between terminals. Currently, various telecommunication networks exist which enable this type of communication. Examples of such networks include Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN), Wide Area Networks (WAN), and most recently Neighbor Awareness Networks (NAN). Neighbor Awareness Networking is a network protocol developed by the Wi-Fi Alliance® for pre-associated service discovery. The purpose of the protocol is to synchronize Wi-Fi Stations (STA) in a STA to STA (S2S) environment such that STAs are able to discover and trigger connectivity and other interaction based on services published or subscribed to by the STA.
STAs eligible for this connectivity must be NAN enabled and can include devices such as mobile phones, access points, light switches, and other smart devices that are forming part of the internet of things. Connectivity occurs when one or more NAN devices transmit and/or receive synchronization frames, during discovery windows, from other NAN devices located within a NAN cluster. However, the current NAN protocol does not specify which of the discovery windows other than the first window, in which frame transmission should occur.
A number of issues arise from this scenario. For example, the first discovery window (DW0) only appears once approximately every 8.3 seconds; this leads to intervals that can be too large for some applications running on the NAN device. Too large of an interval can lead to a missed advertisement that was to be presented as a client neared a venue, a light switch which has an 8.3 second responsiveness delay, or other applications which would be degraded by a delayed responsiveness. These intervals would be unacceptable.
Also, if discovery windows are randomly selected by the device, two STAs could possibly not intersect or have a common window until DW0 repeats. By only having one designated common window, the MAC would become less efficient, as it would have to transmit possibly at every discovery window until a correlation is achieved. Therefore, it is with respect to these and other considerations that the present improvements have been developed.